The Broken Curse
by Emhyr var Emreis
Summary: Twenty-four years after Voldemort's fall: As Lily Potter, daughter of Harry, heads into her fourth year at Hogwarts struggling to navigate the world of school, boys, and Quidditch, a dark wizard from a forgotten era rises to finish his master's work. In the following chaos, Lily throws love and life to the wind to fight the most dangerous enemy the magical world has ever known.
1. A Day at the Ministry

Hear the man draw breath. If he is lucky, he will soon draw his last.

He hears nothing else, not the cries of his fellow wizards and believers that haunt his nights, not the screaming of Muggle fighter-bombers diving a kilometer away and bringing their world's hellish war one massacre nearer to a close. Not the final words of his brother, master, mentor, leader, a man many leagues away, a man apart in body and soul and dreams. Does Gellert Grindelwald have final words? Is Grindelwald a man to face death with a scowl or a sardonic farewell, a toast to part from this mortal coil?

The man does not know. He admits, after all this time, that he does not know his master as he should. All he knows is that Grindelwald heads to death or defeat, for he knows no wizard alive has stood before the might of Albus Dumbledore and triumphed.

He cannot get comfortable. This shadowy, subterranean burrow is not built for comfort but for sleep, a lifetime's worth for any Muggle or lesser wizard. He would prefer to stand alongside Grindelwald, to die before Dumbledore's fury, to close out life a man and no less. Instead duty renders him a mole, a coward. A back-up plan, so says Grindelwald, for no man is above a vision – and the man knows his master's vision supersedes all else, even his own acceptance, embrace even, that he has failed in life. He has won no great victory. He has not etched his name in the stone of time and space. None shall look upon his works and despair.

Yet, Grindelwald's voice – his voice? – reminds him from some caved-in corner of his mind. Yet. Has his story only been postponed? He refuses to lie to himself. The two greatest wizards of his day, arguably of history, may fight to the death as he cowers here in this living grave. He will awake to Dumbledore's world, Dumbledore's order, and open his eyes to witness a past he has lived, a history he has watched unfold. The present tells him that Grindelwald is a true man, a just one, a visionary building a wizarding world that need not be plagued by the kind of bloodshed and atrocities the Muggles practice every decade or so, of the type the man has watched annihilate his native Germany as the Soviet fury sows wreckage and births despair. All lost. A vision shredded because of a moment of anger, a spark of passion and wrath, a spell gone wrong and fate pitted the dreams of Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald in a fight to the death.

What a pity. What a waste. Something foul hides in the twisting of life.

The air in the burrow warms. The man can wait no longer. How long will he sleep? Will he even wake? This mysterious magic, these experimental spells: He admits, he does not like Grindelwald's back-up plan for more reasons than one. But someone must remember. Someone must ferry a dream back into the waking world, long after history has scourged it from record.

He lies upon the hard earth and stares at the granite ceiling just six feet above him. Not a burrow, a coffin. Perhaps he shall never wake up. Perhaps he'll suffocate in this bungalow and the ground will bury him until some adventurer in the future unearths his bleached bones, a fossil in a museum for the young wizards and witches of tomorrow to ogle. Perhaps, deep down, he hopes for just that.

No. He is not so lucky. He will have to live with his shame when his hour comes round at last, his revelation at hand. Yeats was right. From beyond the fog, Bethlehem calls.

"Devil take me, then," he whispers.

The man aims his wand at his temple, closes his eyes, and whispers the words.

* * *

It is grand, a colossus! Not enough and beckoning her onwards, and yet so much that she feels the walls, the crowds, the little paper plane-memos zipping through the halls as fleet as brooms in the Quidditch games she learned to love from her mother and father, all of it swirling and coalescing down around her as if the very Ministry of Magic itself wants to trap her here. For fourteen years her father never brought her here. Now here she stands, and now Lily Potter is unsure of what to do next. She is a boat unmoored, and the sea that rumbles through this great burrow pushes her this way and that as she makes no headway at all.

She lets her father do the talking. "Albus had career counseling just last year," Harry Potter tells the tall, richly-dressed man before them. Kingsley Shacklebolt, Minister of Magic. Legendary wizard, and thus no different than her father. "But we're all Gryffindors. We're a little more set in things. Lily's the Ravenclaw of the family, so I thought it'd be better to show her around before throwing her off into the deep end."

"This is one of those examples of parents learning what to do for the youngest child through trial and error with the older children, I take it?" Kingsley says with a smile. "I'm also going to guess this was Ms. Granger's idea."

"Well, yeah. But, you know, Lily's not her kid. I get at least half the credit."

Kingsley chuckles. "Your father wants one Auror to follow him, doesn't he?" he asks her.

She knows they want her to smile, and so she smiles. "It's good to look around a bit. I've got another four years at Hogwarts to decide on careers, so it's good to look around."

Diplomatic, neutral, and Kingsley goes with it: "I changed my mind. She sounds like she'll be taking my job one day. Well don't let me hold you up, Lily. Harry, as always, a pleasure."

Kingsley is a titan, and yet she does not know why he looks the part of an institution so much more than her father. Her father killed Voldemort. Her father is Harry Potter, who old Professor Binns talks about in History of Magic, who her classmates whisper about when they gossip behind her back. Yet Harry Potter is at heart a mummer, a persona wholly apart from the father with green eyes who clutches her shoulders and smiles. They are two men, different men, she thinks. One is the war hero who killed the greatest dark wizard of all time. The other man is the one across from her here in the Ministry, the one who yells at James to stop lobbing dungbombs through Al's bedroom window, who drinks butterbeer with Uncle Ron over games of exploding snap, who slow-dances with her mother in the kitchen when they think she's asleep, who tells her that he was an idiot to take Divination, and that she shouldn't worry about taking A Study of Ancient Runes. These are worlds apart, and she is mystified that she keeps one foot in either of them.

"I've a meeting with Dean at nine-thirty," he tells her, his grip on her right shoulder clutching just tight enough to tell her that she'll be fine. "Wish I could skip it, but, you know. You know Dean's son, right? He's in your house."

She does. Another Auror, another of his people, the ones who know that other man named Harry Potter. And yet a mummer too, the man a father of a fellow rising fourth-year boy she knows so well, a boy who calls Ravenclaw Tower home as she does, who sees his father a Gryffindor and takes another path. She has not told her father much about the boy, nor has she told her mother. Al has thankfully kept that secret. "I'm okay waiting," she says.

"How about this," he says, "Aunt Hermione's down in the Ministry Archives researching something for a case she's working on for her department. I'm tied up until eleven – why don't I take you down there and meet her, hm? Afterwards I can show you around my office. We can get lunch later, the three of us. Besides, there's loads in the Archives. I'll probably have to pry you away. If there's anything you want to know, it's there, and she'll show you anything else."

There's the other side, she thinks. There is a Harry Potter the world needs, and the world needs him this morning. The world does not need Lily Potter. She hears the taunts of other Ravenclaws, of the Gryffindors she can't stand but can't tell her father and mother about, for fear of their reaction: _Lily. Are you sure she's a Potter? Maybe her mother's had a fling with some other guy, had her pop out on accident. Red hair; you don't see her brothers with red hair. Tell me that's not a coincidence_. Her father is heroic, a symbol. She is just another rising fourth-year girl at Hogwarts, except she battles her last name along with the other girls.

She cannot say any of this to her father, however, especially not here in the heart of the world that reveres his past. All she can do is agree and follow him through the cavernous halls of the Ministry, the ceiling lights glistening off of the _Potter_ on the guest badge pinned to her chest.

When she follows her father off the Ministry's creaky elevator on Level Five, announced by a cheerful voice as the floor for the Department of International Magical Cooperation, among other offices, a pair of hooded men watch her step off. They stare straight ahead, the hoods veiling their eyes, and when the elevator doors close and the car descends, Lily smells ash and soot.

"Unspeakables," her father tells her, "from down in the Department of Mysteries. Don't worry about them. Heck, I chief Law Enforcement and they don't even report to me. Come on."

Her stomach churns with doubt. Were they burning something down there, or do they all smell like that? She has heard of them, of course. Her father, her mother, her aunt and uncle, they had all broken into the Department of Mysteries when they were a mere year older than she is now. Queer beasts live down there on the bottom floor of the Ministry with names like time, space, death, love. Prophecy. A million unseen things she only knows from textbooks and hours spent prowling about Hogwarts's library, gleaning clues of a fight that even her parents shied away from all these years later.

Mysteries, within and without. She wants to understand.

If the Hogwarts library impressed her, the Ministry Archives swallow her whole. Surely every book ever written by magical hands calls this place home, soldiers standing in formation within bookshelves that rise twelve, fourteen, sixteen rows high. Glass spheres the size of her palm float through the air between the stacks, encapsulating golden flames that seem to burn the very ether itself. Wizards and witches flit between stacks like ghosts appearing for a visage of black cloaks and pointed hats before disappearing behind another shelf. Lily has left the bowed heads, slouched shoulders, grumbled greetings, and quill twitching of the working world above for an alcove that invites her first smile of the day.

The witch who rounds the nearest shelf with a grin has not aged from the young woman Lily sees in the photographs around her home. Her straight back and raised chin, her bushy hair and perfect teeth that Uncle Ron teases her about for some reason, all the same features at forty-two that made Hermione Granger at eighteen. Now she is not just heroine and Hogwarts post-graduate but Executor of the British Department of International Magical Cooperation, but the warm look she gives Harry, the glance of understanding Lily has spotted innumerable times gliding like an invisible spell between the two sorcerers, parents, and friends, speaks that titles do not make the woman.

"The she is," Hermione says. "Looking all grown up, too."

Her father clutches Lily's shoulder. "Yeah. Enjoy not getting up for work every day while you can."

"Says the man who laughed when James admitted he slept through his Astronomy O.W.L.," Hermione snorts.

"It's Astronomy. It's not like he stopped breathing."

"It's an important class, Harry," says Hermione. She glances at Lily, scrunches up her face, and laughs. "Alright, not that important, but if you start being too honest Lily's going to sleep through it too. Do you want to go one-for-three in kids who actually take that exam?"

"Al raising the bar again. Can't imagine where he gets that from," Harry says. He pulls Lily close and tousles her hair. "I'm going to ditch you on Aunt Hermione, kiddo, but I'll be back as soon as Dean tells me all his boring briefing notes. Don't let your aunt give you an entrance exam to the Department of Mysteries while I'm gone."

Hermione chuckles as Harry leaves. "I'd like to think you'd get into somewhere better than that, Lily. But come on. Your dad's got his daily pressing issue. I remember when he was having those at your age."

The Archives pull at her from all sides as Hermione leads her through the maze. Titles like _Exspiravitum, or On the Origins of Wraiths_ and _The Four Voyages to the Vampire's Covens_ tug at her curiosity like fishermen's lures. From _Magistrate Beligeiro's Tryst with the Veil_ leaks a green mist that coalesces into a ghost in the shape of a maiden, beckoning Lily with a smile and a twirl before darting back into the red leather-bound tome. _Solare's Secrets of Merry Aide as Understood from the Moste Radiant of Heavenly Bodies_ glows like a sun that lights up an entire corridor. The book chuckles as Lily passes, and she has an urge to grab it off the shelf and memorize every page.

"I know that face. I used to love spending time in the Hogwarts library," Hermione says as Lily wanders wide-eyed through the stacks. "There's so much to learn that's not taught in class. Go on, take a look at something. Books are meant to be read, and the Ministry's got the largest library in the magical world here."

So it was Aunt Hermione's idea to bring me here, Lily thinks. For good reason: Neither of her cousins Rose and Hugo, Hermione's children, want anything to do with a career in the Ministry. Rose wants to go overseas and travel like Teddy Lupin and cousin Victoire had, and Hugo's idea of a good time is vegetating in the Hufflepuff Common Room. James has a summer internship with the Puddlemore United Quidditch team here in his first summer after graduating Hogwarts, and for all of Al's dedication and hard work, even Lily knew her bookish brother sees Hogwarts as both an education and a career. But show off what the Ministry has to offer to the Ravenclaw daughter, the baby of the family, and maybe Aunt Hermione and her father has someone to follow in their footsteps. If she likes learning and spends time in the library, well, show her the grandest library of all. Whet her appetite and watch her follow the right path all on her own. You cannot force a man to revelation. He must find the path himself.

A good plan, and it's working. Lily doesn't notice Hermione leave her to her perusing, smiling as she watches her niece plop down beside a shelf with _The Second Act of Godric Gryffindor_ for company.

How much times has passed when a soft, unfamiliar voice rouses her from her reading? "Ah, the Gryffindor tetralogy. Part two, looks like. Riveting tale, but not the best of the Hogwarts founders."

A man with a warm grin and wearing a brown woolen tunic crouches on the other side of the aisle, clutching a book with a green-and-silver cover. Lily almost misses him when she looks up: Between his plain, round, unshaven face, his blonde hair cut so close he looks nearly bald, and his almost peasant-like attire, he is a far cry from the wizards and witches in their black and red and silver robes strolling through the Archives. He has none of the air of importance and urgency they carry around like weights bound to their backs.

Lily scoots back against her shelf. "Er, I don't think I know you."

"Lily Potter, isn't it?" he says. "I spotted you walk in with your father. And Hermione Granger, of course. Who doesn't know her?"

Ah. The next phase of the ploy: Get one of the Archives's librarians to encourage her without parental guidance. _You'll be an adult in three years, Lily_ , she could hear her father say. _Mum and I won't always be around for you then_. "Oh. Yeah. I'm just a visitor."

The man, librarian she supposes, nods and appraises the page she's on. "Godric's pact of friendship with King Aethelred the Unready of the English. A half-dozen years after Hogwarts's founding, and still relevant today as a key note of tolerance given our new world ever since your father ended Voldemort's threat. But history's written by the victors, I suppose, and Gryffindor's everyone's darling ever since that moment Voldemort fell. I suppose you'd know, in your family. Gryffindors everywhere. They can be a bit overbearing with their chest-thumping, can't they?"

She suppresses a laugh. "Are you a librarian or a historian or something?"

"Oh, I know my history. Not so much my library science," the man says. He passes her the silver-and-green book with a gentle hand. "Rumor has it from one Neville Longbottom that you take after your aunt more than your mother and father, so much so that he wagers you and a certain Hugo Weasley were switched at birth. If that's the case, I know what kind of curiosity Miss Granger has. Try this book if you want more than just Gryffindor's view of things."

"You know Professor Longbottom?" Lily asks, looking over the book. _The World Unseen: Salazar Slytherin's Last Curse_ , reads the title in glittering green.

The man nods. "I've spoken to him. He's an interesting man, so noble and yet out of the spotlight your father has commanded all these years. One day, dare I say soon, he'll not be just Professor Longbottom of Herbology, but Headmaster Longbottom, Protector of Hogwarts." He waves his hand towards the book she's opened. "A little history. Salazar Slytherin, Rowena Ravenclaw, and other things beyond the normal histories you'll read about from droll Professor Binns, I'd wager."

"I don't know many Slytherins," Lily says, leafing through the first few pages. "There's a Slytherin boy my cousin Rose hates. Scorpius Malfoy."

"Malfoy is a hated name in these times. Your Scorpius has his grandfather and father to thank for that. But I don't think being a Slytherin is the cause of that. Indeed, I don't think Salazar himself would be proud of the deeds Lucius Malfoy got up to, let alone the horrors brought about by Voldemort. Not at all. I doubt he knew of the faraway consequences of his actions taken so long ago."

"Hmm?" Lily looks up after a minute of silence. The man is nowhere to be found, not in front of her, not beside her, not in the aisle. He has disappeared, here one moment, gone the next. She purses her lips: Alone again without a word. The man had been well caught up on his history, less so on his social skills. She empathizes.

 _The World Unseen_ smells old. Its vellum pages crinkle and crackle as Lily turns them, and illuminations wriggle and writhe over the parchment. On one page a slimy, indigo, crab-like beast trots around the parchment and lunges at a wand-wielding wizard draped in mail. On another, a man shrouded in black smoke materializes and dissipates before a witch's stunning spell. _The original subject that led to Salazar Slytherin devising the Pact of Blood_ , reads the caption, _and the individual that eluded Godric Gryffindor's watchmen for years while terrorizing Exeter. His capture is theorized as the cause behind the construction of Slytherin's first Chamber of Secrets, deep below –_

Tales of Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin working together fighting monsters? Fun, and it would drive Rose mad, but it isn't Lily's taste.

She's nearly forgotten about the book and the historian who knows Professor Longbottom by the time Hermione comes back around. "I see you got caught up," Hermione says. "What's this?"

Lily looks towards where she left _The World Unseen_. The book's gone, emptiness in its place, bare wooden floor. Her breath catches in her throat and she swallows her confusion.

"Gryffindor's history?" Hermione says, pawing through _The Second Act of Godric Gryffindor_. "Hm." She's quiet, contemplative, her eyes downcast before she glances at her niece. "It was a funny thing, really. The Sorting Hat almost didn't put me in Gryffindor. It almost sent me to Ravenclaw instead, like it did you. It's not exactly a scientific process, sorting."

Lily hears, but she's not listening. The book's disappearance vexes her.

Something glows down the aisle, growing brighter. Hermione turns and frowns as a blue-and-white stag bounds past the corner of the aisle, dashing towards her at a full gait before slowing to a trot, then a canter before skidding to a stop before them. Lily knows it at once: Her father's Patronus.

She has seen it once before. Four years ago, more than a year before she began her Hogwarts career, this very stag dashed up to her family's home in Ottery St. Catchpole. Being October with both Al and James at school, she and her mother had been the only ones to receive her father's warning to escape home. Antonin Dolohov, the Patronus had said then. The last Death Eater at large, and he's been spotted around the local area. Get out. Lily's father, along with her Uncle Ron, Dean Thomas, fellow Auror Michael Corner, and several others had subdued Dolohov later that night, but Lily hadn't stopped crying for days.

Her breath catches as the Patronus speaks again: "Stay where you are. Something's going on up here on the ground floor. Keep Lily safe."

Hermione draws her wand, her jaw set. Lily hears murmurs throughout the library as the ceiling shakes, a rumble echoing through the stacks as if the earth deep below quakes. A minute passes. Two. Lily's stomach churns.

Ash. Lily smells smoke, a faint smell, not from a fire burning now, but as from the remnants of a fire that burnt out, reduced to embers long ago.

Another minute passes with Hermione's free hand clutching Lily's forearm, guarding her niece behind her, her wand drawn as if ready to defend against Voldemort reborn, if need be. Finally one of the paper planes Lily had seen earlier in the Ministry halls darts forward into Hermione's grasp. She opens the paper, frowning, and then her frown turns to a look of horror. Lily only sees a glimpse of the scrawled writing before Hermione crumples it in her hand, but what she makes out is enough.

 _Smoke_ , she reads. _Assassin_. And _Kingsley Shacklebolt._


	2. A Time for Gryffindors

_Terror Sweeps Magical Europe!_

 _AMSTERDAM - Mysterious attackers described by witnesses as "wraiths of smoke" struck for the fourth time in as many weeks on Thursday evening in an attack on the Dutch Ministry of Magic. Shortly after sundown, unknown attackers murdered Dutch Minister for Magic Betje Visser, three national departmental heads, and several staffers in a surprise raid that eluded newly-placed magical defenses erected after similar attacks claimed the lives of the heads of magical government in Berlin, Vienna, and in the brazen midmorning attack in London. British Head of Magical Law Enforcement Harry Potter, a rumored candidate for emergency British Minister for Magic elections in the wake of former Minister Shacklebolt's murder during the London attack, denounced the attackers as "cowardly" and urged unity and vigilance amongst European magical peoples. In a statement in Diagon Alley –_

Lily slumps over the _Daily Prophet_. Neither her mother nor her father are home, and neither can chastise her for dwelling on seeing too much with eyes that hitherto have seen too little. _You didn't do anything wrong, Lily_ , she can hear her father saying. _Lily, you've school soon. Everything's going to be fine. Everything's going to be alright_ , her mother says.

She does not blame herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She only wonders why such things have to happen in a world the adults promise is safe, a world where Voldemort is dead and her father is a hero. His world. A new world. A secure world. Shouldn't that be a world where things like this don't happen?

"Hey, Butt," James says to her as he strolls into the Potter home dining room, rubbing his eyes. He scowls at the newspaper and pulls it away from her. "Why're you reading this? Lily, Mum and Dad've told you – "

"I know," she grumbles, head down. James wants to play older sibling, she knows. She only wants to be left to her own devices, to understand the terror inherent to a peaceful world without self-professed wise men telling her what she's supposed to know.

It is to be an election to lead magical Britain then, a vote in a time when rage and fears trump the reason and thoughtfulness that fortify Lily's Ravenclaw House. A time for anger, a time for Gryffindors. The post of Minister for Magic would go to Harry Potter in a heartbeat if given the chance, but Lily has heard the rejections her father has grumbled at her mother in tense late-night discussions in the Potter home dining room, when more self-assured children would be asleep. Harry Potter is not a politician. He is a warrior, and a warrior has no place managing the governmental labyrinth that swallowed Lily up and punctured the balloon lifting her worldly wonder. They are not as infallible as they look, these leaders, these people she should look up to. Reassurance eludes her, and James's get-over-it platitudes don't help.

Al sighs when she summons the courage to talk, when they as sit as just two children on the grassy hills of Ottery St. Catchpole that overlook the adjacent Muggle village. Below, happy people. Uninformed people, and ignorance is a blissful fourteen years blasted apart as if lanced by the Killing Curse that closed Kingsley Shacklebolt's eyes forever.

She averts Al's look: Those damn eyes of his see through me, she thinks. Green eyes, her father's eyes, deeper than hers or James's. A wizard's eyes. "Lily," he says at last, "Maybe we can't say what's going to happen, but some day you and I are going to be where Dad and Aunt Hermione are today. You, me, James. Cousin Rose and Hugo and Victoire and Teddy Lupin. We have to learn from what happens today so that we can make the right decisions tomorrow."

The right decisions. You're going to get yourself killed one day doing some right decision, Al, she thinks. And you're too old inside for being a sixth-year at Hogwarts. "Why is this happening? These people attacked the Ministry, what if they come to Hogwarts?"

"We stick together," he says, his vacant face telling her his mind is elsewhere. "Mum and Dad and Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron toughed out tougher odds at our ages. Before long, we'll inherit the world, and the world won't wait for us to grow up to go on, for better or worse. Besides, what would they want at Hogwarts, Professor Longbottom's stinky plants?"

The rest of Magical Britain is not so optimistic, Lily sees when she carts her school trunk and screeching great horned owl, Anri, through King's Cross on the dawning of her fourth year at Hogwarts. There is an unease at home in the great train station, and not just from the Muggle police armored all in matte black, toting their so un-wand-like guns and labeled with phrases like HOMELAND URBAN RESPONSE. Around are more subtle signs, men and women who seem like Muggle travelers and commuters in gray suits and brown leather jackets, loiterers with wand tips poking out from the cuffs of their sleeves, prowling eyes shadowed in veils of boredom and feigned irritation whispering _Obliviate_ now and then to dissuade the Muggle security's suspicion at the number of strange-dressed visitors ferrying owls and toads and cauldrons through King's Cross.

"Even the Muggles are uptight nowadays," Lily's mother murmurs as she hurries Lily and Al past where a young boy already in his black Hogwarts robes has spilled enough of a caustic green potion as to bore a hole straight through the planet. More memory charms, Lily thinks. Couldn't someone have built an actual magical train station for the Hogwarts Express?

No. One train station, one cave bursting with ten thousand whispers, twenty thousand eyes seeing attackers and bombs and curses ready to spill from every wand and any person who doesn't look quite right. The woman with the downcast eyes and twitching frown. The man without company walking too close to a child. Ten thousand suspicions and ten thousand accused. The stench of sweat, a tightening in the chest.

On Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters, mothers clutch children, friends huddle in groups and wall off the innumerable others. Anxiety is a chorus, and the Hogwarts Express's whistle is a whimper.

Lily's mother stops Al and her before they can board the train and find their friends. "Listen," she says, her eyes bright, her red hair blown about in a cold September gust rushing in from the outside, "I know it's hard to think about school with all that's been going on the last month, but it's your sixth and fourth years. All this is going to be alright. You leave this kind of worrying to your dad and I, and you just worry about studying. And try to have fun, for Merlin's sake. I know it won't be so chaotic without James around at last." She smiles as Al pleads a Prefect's duties, eying the train. "Go on, then, Al. And write more than once a month this year. I'll make Hagrid bug you if you don't."

Alone with her mother in the crowd, Lily feels a churn in her stomach. The train she'd welcomed and jumped aboard the last three years looks less like an old friend and more like a smoldering dragon, a crimson beast belching smoke warning of something wicked coming her way. It's just Hogwarts. Nowhere's safer than Hogwarts. Except the Ministry, perhaps.

"Hey," her mother says, pulling her close. "Everything alright? You can talk to me, Lily."

She shakes her head and examines her trainers. "I'm fine."

"I talked to Professor Longbottom last week. Your first Hogsmeade trip's the first weekend of November; it's early this year. If you want, Dad and I can come up and visit. We can even drag James along. Or if you want a weekend or two here and there to come home – "

"Mum, I'll be fine."

Her mother smiles. The corners of her eyes pull lines a little longer than in the older pictures around the Potter Home, and a strand of gray here and there infiltrates her hair, but there's a kindness and silent understanding in her smile that Lily thinks – hopes – will never fade. It is a smile of home, of unconditional belonging. It is the warmth of a hearth fire and a blanket on a snowy night, an open door to invite Lily home, hot cocoa beside her favorite plush chair and a melody warbling from the gramophone. Her mother's smile is the moment before she falls asleep, listening to the night twinkling outside her window, every foe and monster in the darkness nothing more than a half-remembered dream.

Her mother hugs her and breaths in deeply. "Okay. I'm proud of you, Lils. You go have fun this term."

In a minute Lily is aboard the steaming train, and her mother is but a dot of windblown red hair in a shrinking station. In another moment, the train rounds a curve and she is gone.

The Hogwarts Express is a zoo. Boys and girls and owls and cats pack compartments. Laughter fogs windows. The sound of scrabbling hands tearing open the foil of chocolate frogs, the smell of hastily-applied perfume and butterbeer. Everywhere books, trunks, robes, friends and foes, the greens and grays and browns of England beneath a muddled sky zipping past in the windows. The _Daily Prophet_ forecasts rain.

Lily wriggles her way past snogging seventh-years, first years with trunks exploded across the train hallway, and a tabby cat evading a crying girl in a Tutshill Tornadoes shirt. She glances into compartments as she moves down the train cars. Faces, some she recognizes, most she doesn't, all turned away, lost in their own conversations and their little worlds that don't include her. Her cousin Rose in one, her flaming red mane just a shade off of Lily's darker red hair, surrounded by a gaggle of Gryffindor girls that leave no space for one Lily Potter.

She looks for a friendly face. One train cab, the next. Anri the owl hoots and hops up and down in her cage.

A tall, dark-haired girl with kiss-me lips and clad in a red-and-gold, lion-adorned sweater scowls as she crosses Lily's path in the hall. Fellow fourth-year Scarlett Massey does not have a friendly face. She averts her eyes, but shoulders Lily aside as she passes down the aisle. The hit's a subtle thing, but enough to jar a trio of books tied with twin to the top of Lily's trunk for lack of fit. They tumble end-over-end to the floor, her Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook _Bestiary of the Shadows_ flopping open with a puff of smoke bursting from an illustrated page. A snort from the taller girl. Lily frets, sighs, and crouches down to clean up the first mess of this term.

"Pardon, my dear. Just passing through."

Lily scoots over for the trolley loaded with snacks and treats and other delectables, pushed by an old, wizened witch she expects was here on the train back when her grandmother was a student. It's too early for the trolley, she thinks. And that soft, unassuming voice is not the old witch's voice.

She looks up as the trolley passes her by in the hall. A plain man pushes it, his blonde hair so close-cut to be nearly bald, clad in a woolen brown tunic. Ordinary. No air of importance. Goosebumps pop up along Lily's arms.

She's about to say something when the cabin door behind her opens with a _whoosh_ of fresh air. A short, skinny, fierce-looking girl with golden hair and wearing a blue-and-silver sweater breaks into a smile and dashes forward. At once Lily forgets the trolley for a moment, forgets the books and Scarlett, and leaps up to hug her friend. She met Natalie Avery on this train three years ago, and she thanks the burst of confidence that overtook her that day to approach the small girl sitting all alone in a cabin. Now more than just two girls the same age – housemates, friends. There is a magic to Hogwarts, even in this train.

Natalie eyes the mess of books. "What're you doing on the floor?"

A proper greeting after a summer apart. Lily opens her mouth to answer, but first turns around. When she looks down the aisle behind her, there is no trolley. There is no man in a brown tunic.


	3. On the Forest's Edge

Rain falls.

The pitter-patter of the drizzle taps at the roof of Hogwarts's Great Hall, indecision falling from a gray, anvil-clouded sky that vacillates between clearing up and hurling spears of lightning from on high. The roiling clouds weep in the darkening evening when five hundred children celebrate oblivious in the torchlit castle below. A flicker in the night.

Lily has forgotten her nerves, her anxieties. Natalie laughs beside her and spills pumpkin juice from her bronze goblet. Across the great Ravenclaw table, her housemates Devon Thomas and Brandon Rowan tell lewd jokes. The Great Hall reverberates with the sound of children's giggles, of tales told and stories regaled and lives lived. At the front of the Hall behind the golden lectern where Deputy Headmaster Neville Longbottom has just welcomed the school's newest class, Headmistress Minerva McGonagall and Astronomy professor Aurora Sinistra share a toast. Professor Vector, Arithmancy teacher and the head of Hufflepuff house, smiles with wine-stained lips at a suggestion from Slytherin head and Transfiguration professor Daphne Greengrass. At the far corner of the table nearest the door from where the first-years had tromped in, Hagrid clanks a tankard of ale against that of Lily's own head of house, Potions professor Dario Novak.

Hogwarts, as it should be. Home away from home, welcome arms beneath even the darkest skies and the steadiest rain. For a nightmarish summer Lily has drifted the open seas, and now she has returned to port.

The atmosphere is a drug. She half-hears Brandon instructing Devon about the nuances of the Muggle game of basketball, half-sees Natalie sneaking a slice of oyster pie the size of Scotland onto her plate while the other Ravenclaw girls aren't looking. There is magic here in the castle, and only a sliver of it involves wands and spells.

A clinking of a wand against a wineglass brings the noise to a standstill. Headmistress McGonagall clears her throat. Lily has heard her parents, Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron, all of the older generation talk in reverent tones of Albus Dumbledore. They named her brother after him. To her, there will never be a better school leader than the wizened, straight-backed, gray-haired woman standing before the Great Hall today.

"Students, staff," Professor McGonagall begins, raising her goblet, "We celebrate another year of learning, of teaching, of the betterment of magical knowledge. We have all heard of the bad tidings in the news, but I promise you, here at Hogwarts we are safe from the forces run amok in the world. We are free to teach and to learn, to dream and to practice. As a new year dawns upon us, I urge you all: Embrace opportunity. Live for today and work for tomorrow. I have seen dark times come and pass, and after every night the dawn has come. So tonight, feast! Smile! And do please remember that class starts tomorrow. Staff included."

Laughter ripples up and down the great hall as more courses fill plates and platters up and down the four house tables arranged vertically along the Great Hall. Before her Lily spots her cousin Rose, digging into some pasty amidst her posse, Al not far off. She glances behind her. There sits her cousin Hugo and the Hufflepuffs, friends, brothers and sisters. Competition is a foreign word here, so close yet so far from the Ravenclaw table. Achievement here, cooperation there. Styles, theories, bonds and breaks. Badger and eagle. Gold and black, blue and bronze. Cousin and cousin, family together and apart.

Farthest to the wall, the green serpent banner hangs from the ceiling. A flash of silver hair. The boy Rose disparages, Lily thought. The one even Al drops his voice to talk about. A hated name. Malfoy.

Scorpius sits half-in, half-out of the Slytherin table. He is handsome, Lily reflects. A square jaw, half-closed eyes, a drooping frown torn from a tortured musician's drooping glare. His long, straight, silver hair, his eyes a deep blue, bluer than her house's blue. She has heard Rose's complaints: Malfoy is a pest, a _loser_. He has never known and _will never know_ a woman's touch, as if it's prophecy. He is bereft of friends. He rejects Quidditch and plays his guitar all alone, singing _moody_ songs. What Rose finds funny, Lily finds sad. She thinks someone should be there to hold him.

Why should a boy be damned for his last name?

No. This is not a time for off-hours tears, not when Natalie is suggesting that Brandon is really a Muggle and not just a Muggle-born and Devon is waving his wand at her goblet to make the pumpkin juice overflow. James has told her as much: No one wants to be around a crier. _You're too emotional, sis_.

She only just hears her friends' imploring: "What'd you do this summer, Lily?"

A forced smile. A shrug. Natalie eats a bite of oyster pie. "Just kind of hung out. My dad was pushing a lot of career things."

Devon rolls his eyes. "I know how that goes." Lily does know. She knows who her best friend's father is: Dean Thomas, her father's confidante, former fellow Auror, now head of the Auror office under her father's Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Rumor has it Devon's father once dated Lily's mother.

She's thankful for his discretion. Dean Thomas would know everyone in the Ministry building when Kingsley Shacklebolt was killed. She'd tell her other friends what happened when the time was right, and that time wasn't the Welcome Feast.

Natalie is silent through the proceeds. "Careers, psh. Too early for all that," Brandon snorts. His father is a Muggle banker, Lily knows. Finance and officiating and all that. Pounds and dollars and euros. Wealth, and then some. His elder brother is a high-up in a Muggle football team's front office, and athleticism has passed on to her Quidditch teammate, a fellow Chaser at that. He can afford to indulge in his teen years. "Ellie Corner's always talking about what she's going to grow up to be. Bugger that. I'ma enjoy now."

Lily glances down the table. Ellie Corner is fourteen years old, blonde and prettier than Lily according to many of the Ravenclaw boys, a fourth-year like her, lost deep in conversation with fellow fourth-year boy Nathan Goldstein. No doubt she's apt to tell Scarlett Massey in Gryffindor everything she's heard come tomorrow. Friendships and rivalries cross house lines, and Lily has no love for the lion, her father's house, her siblings' house, her mother's house. She is a Ravenclaw. She has seen too many Gryffindors be anything but brave.

A wisp of white flashes past the Ravenclaw table. A pale shade.

Nearly-Headless Nick pinwheels past Natalie and rises up through the table between Lily's goblet of pumpkin juice and her plate. "Ah, Miss Potter!" he cries as Lily jerks back, nearly toppling off her bench. "Lovely as a peach, as every year. It's still my greatest disappointment that the Sorting Head didn't sit you at my house's table, but alas. You'd look good with a golden lion on your chest. Even better on our _defending_ _champion_ Quidditch squad with your cousin Rose, all in red."

Natalie throws an arm around Lily's shoulder and pulls her close. "She looks best in blue."

Lily clutches her hand and smiles as Nick chortles. "To each their own, I suppose that's friendship. Always a sight to see Hogwarts full of laughter again, that's what really counts!"

"Whatd'you and the other ghosts do during the summer, Nick? Just stay here and roam around the castle?" Lily asks.

"This and that," Nick says. His head swings about as he shrugged, provoking a shriek from further down the Ravenclaw table. "It isn't as if we ghosts are bound by the castle walls. Well, a few are, but not me, oh no. I ventured past the Forbidden Forest's edge just two days back. A funny thing, though – it shook me, floating by there. I almost felt corporeal again, like something odd and hot had settled in my stomach and I was about to retch. Only, you understand, I can't so much as retch."

"How horrible," Brandon says. "Retching is the best part of my day."

Nick ignores his japes. "I can't say what it was. Something's lurking in the forest, my gut tells me. If I had a gut. You know."

Centaurs would give anyone a shaky feeling in their guts, Lily thinks. They own the Forbidden Forest now. She has heard her mother's stories, how her father and Aunt Hermione had led their professor-turned-usurper, the horrible woman Umbridge whose toady likeness still spotted joke boxes in Uncle George and Uncle Ron's shop on Diagon Alley. She's never set foot in that place, and her nerves fire when she thinks about doing so. Al has told her all about Hagrid's trip into the Forest his fourth year, an annual thing at the centaurs' permission. Perhaps she should have taken Divination after all.

The night unfurls. The Prefects whisk five hundred-odd children off to their dormitories and beds. Lily spots her brother, tall, straight-backed, at the head of a wave of Gryffindors en route to their tower. _He is Dad, in another form._ For a moment she is proud of him in a way she never felt for James in the three years they shared the castle. James is her eldest brother, strong, talented, athletic, popular. Everything a girl could want. Yet it is Al who wears the family name, more than him, more than her. She shies away from most Gryffindors, but not him.

There will never be a Voldemort for him to slay, no great menace to tackle. She thinks he's good enough without such a beast.

Ravenclaw Tower twinkles with the arrival of the hundred-fifty students who pride the blue-and-bronze eagle, new, old, seventh-years to wide-eyed first-years. Dust-spotted books, platinum-inlaid astrolabes, rosewood desks, and leather-covered chairs flicker in the light of a half-dozen fireplaces. A scale replica of the night sky, sans the anvil clouds above, glistens against the roof, complete with a waning quarter-moon and every constellation native to the northern sky in late summer. It's both beautiful and a handy study aid for Astronomy, Lily thinks. The great room is awash in twilight blue and milky white, a hue romantic, a dusk welcome for learners and lovers alike. Magic, magic alive in Hogwarts, magic alive in Ravenclaw Tower. She may be a Potter, but this place feels like home. Nick or no Nick.

Ten beds space the fourth-year girls' dormitory, Lily's bunk closest to the door. When they still spoke civilly years ago, Ellie told her she felt sorry for Lily's spot. She doesn't think so. She feels special there, a chosen spot, like she's responsible for the ten girls who sleep here, five who spend more time commuting from their homes in Hogsmeade, the others like her, distant visitors from far-flung wizarding villages across Britain. She is proud to man the door. The watcher in the night. The eagle diurnal and nocturnal, _semper vigilans._ She thinks her father would approve. _Ravenclaw. Gryffindor. Bravery within and without._

She is settling beneath a hillock of blankets, the other eight girls asleep, when Natalie creeps out of the washroom. In the light of lightning flashes, Lily spots a blue-purple splotch on her friend's shoulder. It creeps up from beneath Natalie's frilly nightgown, blooming beside her neck and curling unseen towards her chest.

Lily raises her head. "Nat?" she says. Her friend jumps. "Everything alright?"

Natalie nods, nothing more, and buries herself in the sarcophagus of her covers. Lily spots something poking from the mess that bulges from her friend's trunk, shoved beneath her bed. A stuffed animal, a unicorn. She waits a half-hour, unable to sleep herself, her guts alight with the nervousness of a new term, of being around these people she loves and hates and ignores and embraces. Children. Friends, enemies. Students. Wizards and witches.

When she sees Natalie's blankets rise up and down in rhythm, Lily slinks out of bed. The stuffed unicorn is a welcoming friend, silky, soft, wrapped in white-and-silver plush and stitched with a violet smile. She tucks the stuffed animal in the crook of her sleeping friend's arm.

Chickenpox struck Lily at the tender age of six, red spots so angry and aggressive that her mother refused to leave her side for the worst three nights. She remembers laboring in her bed, her mother's palm pressed to her head, her voice soothing her to sleep through the itching and the fever:

 _Hush now baby, don't you cry,  
I'll be with you 'til morning light.  
_ _And when you fret, I'll be your cheer,  
_ _We'll welcome the sun and dry your tears._

No one should feel alone. Not here, not Hogwarts, of all places.

Nothing is said the next morning at breakfast. As it should be. Friendship requires no thanks.

"Goddamn double Hagrid" Brandon says, chucking the schedule Professor Novak has handed out against the table. "I'd be fine without the goddamn Gryffindors joining us all damn morning. Swell."

Devon shrugs. "Guess Arithmancy looks good now, huh?"

"Piss off, mate. Arithmancy. You bastard. How many people even take that?"

"Seven."

Lily sees the appeal. Seven fourth-years across all four houses taking Arithmancy sounds a lot better than spending all morning with the Gryffindors, even if it means missing Hagrid for Care of Magical Creatures. At the Gryffindor table, Scarlett Massey elbows her square-jawed friend, Cillian McLaggen, and shoots a scowl Lily's way. She can hear Aunt Hermione in her head: _Arithmancy's a real useful subject, Lily. Really useful. I don't use anything from Care of Magical Creatures, really…I tried to convince Hugo and Rose to take it, but you know they're not really interested…_

A victory for Aunt Hermione, then.

The castle grounds are fresh with dew in the cool morning air, and Hagrid's fresh with energy. Lily does not believe her father when he claims Hagrid was once tepid on teaching: He is one of her favorite teachers, maybe a tie with Professor Longbottom for her favorite. Pair Care of Magical Creatures with the Hufflepuffs and cousin Hugo instead of Scarlett and the Gryffindors and it would be her favorite class.

"See 'em an' weep!" Hagrid exclaims as he opens a row of wicker boxes. "Sooterkins. Cute lil tykes. Grab a handful o' lettuce, a carrot or two, and catch 'em. We'll start with feedin'."

Cute from the outset, the sooterkins quickly prove Hagrid's penchant for understatement. Lily's fellow Ravenclaw Ethan Hunt approaches the first of the blue-gray, capybara-esque rodents with a fist of lettuce with good intentions. The creature hisses at him, spits up golden bile, and tears off towards Hagrid's pumpkin patch.

"Now now, he's jus' a bit shy!" Hagrid calls as a sooterkin urinates before Scarlett and hurls itself towards the Black Lake. "Patience, tha's what's needed! We've got an odd number o' the lil guys – Lily, why don' you share with Brandon and Natalie?"

Lily figures that if she was a teacher, she'd rely on the students she knew best, as well. Her sooterkin is anything but diminuitive, however: When Brandon approach the rodent, it huddles around its legs and shakes as if it's afflicted with a seizure. "Hagrid, what's wrong with this one?" Lily asks, afraid to pet the rodent as it squirms and wriggles away from her.

"Aw, tha's their nature," Hagrid says. As Natalie tries to soothe the terrified creature, he takes the time to pull Lily away from the group. "E'rything alrigh'? I heard from yer dad tha' y'were there when Kingsley…all tha'."

"It's fine."

Hagrid nods. "Gotta worry about yer dad, tha's all. He's been gettin' himself into trouble since his firs' year here, when he was smaller than you. Him and Hermione and Ron, and yer mother. Time's flyin', Lily. I'm all gray, now. Dunno when I got this old."

Lily knows. _Giants can live for three hundred years, or more_ , Aunt Hermione had told her. _Who knows how long Hagrid'll be around?_ Yet gray hairs outnumber black ones in his beard, and wrinkles criss-cross his beard. A great, lazy, black wolfhound, Shep, slumbers by his foot. _Always gotta have a dog,_ Hagrid told her during her first year, before she'd befriended Natalie and when she'd felt so alone in Ravenclaw Tower. Lonely girl, with none but a teacher and one older brother for friends. How horrible things could've gone. _There's always something about animals that'll keep you company, even if they're as lazy as Shep here. My last dog, Fang, was even lazier._

Her friends. Hagrid. Professor Longbottom. She has people she trusts here in this castle so far from home.

"Is something going on in the forest?" she asks, nodding towards the imposing pines of the Forbidden Forest, a wall of green and black before the welcoming castle grounds. "Nick was talking last night during supper as if something was up."

Hagrid shakes his head. "Not tha' I know. Centaurs've kept to themselves fer a while. Haven' even seen Firenze about. They've been more secretive as of late, truth be told."

Lily's sooterkin howls, and she picks up the oversized rodent in her arms. When she looks close, she spots a number of black, worm-like ridges digging into the beast's skin, a coat of armor growing from head to foot. "Where'd you get these things?" She asks.

"Wizard from the continent was eager t'get rid of 'em," Hagrid says, shrugging. "Dutch or German guy, couldn' tell. Said he was a magizoologist, like yer middle namesake, Luna. Good deal. Sooterkins are on the O.W.L., an' I thought I'd get a head start fer you all before next year."

Lily looks closer. Her sooterkin howls at her, a piteous cry, and its eyes swirl in gray and black whirlpools. Up close its fur stinks of ash, of a burnt-out flame. There's something wrong with this one, she thinks.


	4. Old Magic and New

_Thanks to TimeyWimeyMagicWagic for the wonderful review! I really appreciate all feedback and the support you've all given in reading, following, etc.  
_

* * *

Science and sorcery, witchcraft and logic. Lily's wand goes wanting down in the dungeons. Deep within a subterranean, granite-walled classroom lit by silvery-white fires flickering from a dozen torches, a more primeval magic rules. It is the stuff of universes, numbers and ratios and formulae and reactions. Cosmic building blocks, the swords and hammers of a natural empire before which spellcraft and wizardry are but vassals.

Perhaps most importantly, she thinks, there's not a whiff of Charms lingering down here. Wishy-washy nonsense, Charms.

"I dunno how _anyone_ screws up a simple Illusory Charm. It's right there in the book, the wand positions, the spell, _eugh_ ," Ellie Corner had said just loud enough for her to hear during the morning's class with the Hufflepuffs. Never mind that Lily'd at least _partially_ made her parakeet take the appearance of an orange. A squawking orange with wings and legs wasn't so strange. By contrast, her cousin Hugo had conjured a pair of vestigial heads from his parakeet.

At least she hadn't been alone in her struggles. "I'll be sure to pop open my book the next time I'm making birds look like fruit," Brandon had grumbled beside her as his parakeet's legs shrank into the bird's body, leaving the animal to roll around like a bowling pin. Louder he'd quipped, "I mean, gosh, this is so simple that I bet that pimple on Ellie's chin is going to charm Goldstein's face to look like less of a butt."

A satisfying, if crude, way to earn a detention, Lily thinks. It does make watching Ellie lecture Nathan as their cauldron boils over with scarlet muck all the more satisfying.

Professor Novak steps around their mess and eyes their cauldron as it begins to ice over: "It's Potions, not supper, you two. I'll clean it up when class is dismissed. Part of this class is growing comfortable around messes. Not everything you brew in life's going to sit nice and quiet."

Jeremy Dustin, a tall, mousey-blonde, fourth-year Slytherin boy tending to a squealing, shuddering cauldron, laughs. "Any examples, Professor?"

"Anything with gunpowder. A lot of others, but that, paired with an idiot or two, can go wrong in a hurry."

Lily and Devon's Cementing Solution looks close enough to the illustration of a pale blue mud that Professor Novak's stuck to the classroom blackboard. It's not freezing or squealing, at least, and is a shade of blue, if navy counts. Lily imagines that Rowena Ravenclaw would either be chortling or fainting at the collective efforts of her house's fourth-year students.

Devon shrugs. "Good enough, right?"

"It's not good enough, it looks like ghoul poop," Lily grumbles, leaning over their cauldron. "Stir five minutes clockwise, then add – Professor, does the amethyst powder thin this out or is it dead already?"

Professor Novak appraises her mixture with a wry grin. "Can't say it was alive to begin with. Jokes aside, it should be good, assuming everything before this went well."

"So it's just two tablespoons and then heat?"

He picks up her leather pouch filled and take Lily's hand. Sprinkling out enough glittering purple dust to fill her palm, he scowls and adds a pinch more to the pile. "That'll do. If you've gotten the rest right, the formula's pretty liberal at this part as far as quantity goes. I just eyeball it. Maybe not the most scientific method, but often it's no crime to break a rule or two. No one ever would have discovered anything if everything was rigidly exact."

Lily frowns, waits until Professor Novak moves on, and dumps the powder into her solution. In seconds it is a swelling mess, bursting like a melon from the cauldron and spraying her robes and arms with blue goop.

Devon leans over: "Add the powder _throughout_ the ten-minute heating process, the directions say." He laughs, grabs a cloth, and wipes her off as she slumps her shoulders. "Don't sweat it, Lil."

She sighs and flicks goop off her hands. "I probably screwed up something else in the directions anyway."

Devon frowns and tosses his cloth aside. "It's just a potion. C'mon, this thing's dead anyway and we've got only a couple minutes before class is over. Let's pack up. I want to get to supper before all the first-years swarm the place."

Lily hears him but does not listen. She stews in putting away her materials and books long enough for Devon to leave with Natalie and Brandon, tossing a sympathetic look her way before promising to save her a seat at the Ravenclaw Table. She shoves things in her bag and spills a pouch of beetle husks, her frustration boiling over as she scoops up the carcasses. Wonderful start to her fourth year. Ugly rodents with Hagrid, same old Professor Binns, screw-ups in Charms, and now she's messed up her first potion in the class that James laughs at her for considering her best subject: "Potions, really? Might as well specialize in cooking, sis. You can buy potions from any old shop on Diagon Alley."

"Supper'll get cold if you spend all night trying to pack all that in perfectly."

Professor Novak watches her from the front of the class, his wand clutched between two fingers, Ellie's and Nathan's mess already charmed away. Age shows on his face: His close-cropped, balding black hair is tinged with the same gray that pokes out of his week-old beard. A pair of lines crease his forehead, from wear or worry or mirth Lily knows not. A deeper groove cuts across his cheekbone, an old scar. From her father's war, maybe? Or perhaps the one before. She has seen him so many times down here, but she has never gotten to know the man as well as she should. Perhaps it is how he holds himself: While the other teachers, Professor Greengrass, Professor Longbottom, even Headmistress McGonagall, stand straight with a sense of wisdom and knowledge, there's something older, more powerful, to Professor Novak's stance. Muscle rears from his shoulders and arms. He digs his thumbs into his belt loops, his elbows askew, as if he expects trouble. She has seen the same stance – but from the older Aurors her father leads, not from teachers.

She purses her lips. "Sorry. I'll be out in a second."

"You don't have to apologize. I welcome the company," he says. He slumps down at his desk, leaning back in his chair and removing a jug of amber-colored drink from a drawer. "Don't fret the assignment. Cementing Solution's honestly a lot for your first class of the year. It's not for a grade, and it's O.W.L.-level work. We'll revisit it next year. You'll nail it then."

Lily shakes her head and frowns. "I just missed a dumb step. I was stupid."

"Everyone misses things, and anyone who expects a fourteen year-old to get everything right hasn't got their priorities straight. There's enough tales around this castle about your father, your aunt Hermione and uncle Ron, to know they didn't get everything right when they were students. Look where they are. I'd wager if someone asked Hermione Granger if she was proud of the witch you're becoming, she'd nod."

Uncle Ron's experience led him to co-running a joke shop with Uncle George, she thinks. Not exactly a career path to aspire to. "Did you ever meet my parents when you were a student?"

He shakes his head, conjures a glass with his wand, and pours himself a drink. "No," he says, taking a long sip, "I graduated in 1991, a few months before your father arrived. I did know your uncle Charlie. We were the same year. Hell of a Quidditch player. Brilliant wizard, too. Aced a few O.W.L.s, cleared N.E.W.T.-level in a load of subjects, still hadthat bad-boy aura that everyone loved. Whereas I, the Ravenclaw, mostly napped down by the lake and chased girls to little success. Sound strategies for a school-age boy."

Lily smiles and lowers her head. She waves her hand towards the now-empty cauldrons: "So this is on the O.W.L.?"

Professor Novak holds up a hand. "That's not for more than a year and a half. Exams can wait. You have two Quidditch seasons before that, two winter breaks, a whole summer, classes and feasts and suppers and nights in the common room. You're only fourteen once. Enjoy the little things in the here and now. O.W.L.s will always be there later, regardless of whatever pressure the other teachers or your classmates want to talk up."

"It's just that I've talked a lot with my aunt Hermione, and she's said a lot about O.W.L.s and doing well and getting Outstandings on the exams to make it to N.E.W.T. level, and how all these careers – "

"Slow down, Lily," Professor Novak says. "Careers are a long way off. I can tell you right now that no career will be good if you're just thinking about what you're supposed to do. Your parents, your relatives, they're heroes from another time. A different time. Things change. You make and lose friends, find love, make enemies, do…other things. Merlin knows nobody in my class would've pegged me to be teaching at Hogwarts. Back when I was in my fourth year, I guessed I'd find some boring office job at the Ministry after I finally settled down, marry some nice girl around my age, pop out a few kids who would've been attending Hogwarts when your cousin Victoire was here. Maybe they'd have befriended her. Obviously that never happened." He takes another long sip of drink, his eyes gazing off into dead space beyond the dancing silver torchlight. "I've seen enough young wizards and witches to come through my class to know you've got plenty of potential. It's confidence you need to work on, not ability. But growing up as the daughter of your father could do that to anyone, I suppose."

Lily looks at the floor. Compliments are alien things. She's heard them aplenty, from the perfunctory encouragements of her parents and Aunt Hermione to Devon's amusement at her Transfiguration essays that Brandon copied to Professor Longbottom's praise of her work in Herbology. All the same, all white noise. There's something else in Professor Novak's words, something foreign – a raw honesty, a hurt. _Obviously that never happened._

For once her mouth jumps head of her brain. "What changed? About the office job and the nice girl and the kids?"

A shadow runs across his face. Darkness beneath the skin. A flicker of pain, of buried remorse. The twitch of the lips, a moment of remembrance. Old things. Hidden things, hated things. "A lot changed," he says. "It's a better time you live in, Lily. Not so much…so much going on. It was a different time, then compared to now. A more dangerous time."

Dangerous, but different? She thinks of the _Daily Prophet_ , of the blaring headlines, of the headline picture of a hooded wizard clutching a wand in each hand from the most recent paper. _Terror in Warsaw! Violence Plagues Magical Europe._ Perhaps Professor Novak did fight Voldemort, or something else, something terrible. Yet her world feels tenuous at best, a globe teetering on the edge of a cliff before an abyss, vulnerable to the slightest breath to go toppling off into the black deep. Whatever lurks in the dark corners of the world, whatever the _Prophet_ sprays across the front page day after day, it has learned from Voldemort, from Gellert Grindelwald and the magical evils of the past. It hides and bears no name.

She wonders whether Professor Novak is wrong. She wonders just how different of a time it is. She wonders if this peace can last forever, if Hogwarts has weathered its most dangerous storms. A castle steadfast a thousand years, and beyond the walls a future of infinite mists.

Her father's words in the back of her mind: _Hogwarts is here and now and all the little things, Lily. It's not about getting a job or how many Galleons you'll earn per week. It's laughing with Hagrid and opening a butterbeer with your friends and finding something that'll make your heart skip. It's the lurch in your gut the moment you kick off into the air for a Quidditch match and the long walks through falling snow to Hogsmeade. It's where you feel at home at fourteen. It's where you can always feel at home._

On the last day of summer, as the first nip in the air blows in from northerly winds and a thousand fractals of sunlight glisten on the surface of the Black Lake, she steps away from the shoal of anxieties biting at her thoughts.

Beneath a willow at the edge of the Black Lake, a boy. Silver hair, gaunt face, downcast eyes, and a guitar laid across his lap. Malfoy. Rose stood across from him a few meters away, encircled by her usual pack of Gryffindors. Lily can't hear the words exchanged, but she can read lips. She sees her cousin's arms akimbo and her face marred by an effortless sneer, and she hears the Gryffindors' laughter as they leave Scorpius behind. For his sake, Malfoy doesn't retaliate. He doesn't pull his wand, doesn't extend a middle finger, doesn't curse or yell. He sits upright against the tree and lets them pass, his hands resting on his guitar, Rose and her pack just another foul smell carried in on the last breeze of summer.

Lily's legs turn to stone. Three years' experience tells her to walk away, to leave lonesome boys well enough alone. She hears Al's consolations during the summer, when he admitted to her he hadn't kissed a girl until this past year, his fifth: _You're barely fourteen, Lil. Don't worry about it. This year or next or sometime someone'll walk up to you in the Three Broomsticks or late at night in your Common Room when everyone else is asleep and ask you to dance._

To ask her, to approach her. She remembers the heroic tales from her early childhood, of Symond the Sorcerer-Knight and the basilisk he fought through to find his love; of the mysterious mage who sought Rowena Ravenclaw's hand though every obstacle stood in his way; of the story of the Spanish legend El Cid falling in love with his wife, Jimena, at first sight. Tales all, and here she is, before a boy with a hated name and silver hair and she doesn't know what to do. Perhaps, for once, Rose is right and she's building visions in her head just to see them pulled down. Perhaps he is as nasty as the stories Uncle Ron tells of Draco Malfoy and seven years of schoolboy rivalry.

Or perhaps she should ignore what she knows for once and do the approaching herself.

Or not. She takes a step forward, her gut lurches, her heart skips a beat. Scorpius slumps his shoulders and plucks his guitar. One motion seizes Lily's resolve, and her second step sends her walking back up the grounds to the castle. He's probably busy, she thinks. I'd be disturbing him anyway. There's always another time. The sun will rise again tomorrow.

It is when the moon reigns over the sky that things come alive at the edge of the castle grounds, however. Her fluttering heart stiffens and she dreams of the dark.

She walks on the edge of the plane of sleep, just beyond the door that shields her waking mind. Curious beasts loom here, black wisps rising from the Black Lake, bones clawing their way free of the earth across the grounds. Dead things, wizards, Death Eaters, memories of an earlier time that fought and died and cried upon this magical ground. Smoke rises above the castle, and a chorus of specters from the Forbidden Forest howls. She clasps her hands behind her back, the air stinking of sulphur as she approaches Hagrid's hut. Before the small shack tremble owls, flightless, all but one of them huddled against the sides of wooden pens like shattered prisoners shying away from a monstrous warden.

Amidst the pens rests one lone owl, the odd bird out. Her owl, Anri. She lies on her side, gasping and belching up soot, a faithful friend pulled from an unseen fire and left to wither. Burns scald the owl from head to toe. Lily crouches down to rub a hand over the laboring creature, but she does not find singed flesh and feathers. Anri crumbles into ash and gray wisps at her touch. The smoke rises like a ghost, an eidolon, a spirit so alien to the world Lily imagines even Peeves twisting away in terror. It is home in the dream.

Lily is rooted to the spot, a sculpture of a witch frozen by this condensing horror. A strand of smoke unfurls from the sprite and coalesces into an arm, a hand, corpse fingers. When it runs its thumb along Lily's wrist, she shrieks and struggles inside her petrified body.

Blood runs. Her blood, others' blood, old blood. Red and black, gurgling like a brook of molasses. Another ghost rises from her blood, but this one is familiar. Unruly hair. Glasses. A wand in his hand, wizards' robes aflutter. The ghost of her father seeps forth from her veins.

The eidolon clenches its hand. Harry Potter's ghost arches its back, his eyes clamped shut, his mouth gaping in a scream Lily never hears. Instead she listens as the ghost hisses, spits, a serpentine call to history. To house, to an old, hated name and ancient works left behind. The ghost of Harry Potter undulates, coiling like a snake before blowing away in a hot breeze. It dissipates to soot in Lily's frozen, outstretched hand and leaves her with the stench of fire and char.

The eidolon is growing, expanding like a thundercloud. It forms a head, now a gaping mouth, a maw so wide and cavernous that it threatens to swallow Lily whole. Within it she sees – what? Life? Something dragging forth to be born?

She bolts upright in bed. No dream, no grounds, no smells of fire and death and defiant magic. Nine other girls sleep in their bunks in the fourth-year dormitory. Sweat pops up all along Lily's arms, and her heart is aflutter in all the wrong ways.


	5. One Night at Azkaban

_Non-Lily chapter._

* * *

The Dark Lord is dead.

The Dark Lord. Bellatrix. All the Lestranges, if the Auror scuttlebutt Rookwood hears outside his cell is accurate. Rowle. McNair. Is he the last Death Eater?

That thought doesn't bother him as much as it should. It's all the rest, the little things, the little excitements of those two times in his life when he felt alive. Fending off a host of centaurs in the Forest of Dean with Antonin Dolohov his only brother in arms. Skulking through the Ministry, ostensibly one of all those sycophants of the old world, taking in a word from a drunk Ludo Bagman here, an off-hand remark from a depressed, burnt-out young witch there, and waging the Dark Lord's information warfare that the Aurors could only hope to stop. Then again after all those years on the run the glee of the Dark Lord's return, all that fun at it again, and this time the Ministry itself falling. He'd had his run of the place, the future his to orchestrate like a maestro, the Daily Prophet, Ministry edicts, Gringotts – Rookwood tasted global power of a new dawn.

Then Harry Potter, then history. Now Azkaban, a stormy, futureless present, and dreams of better days. Nightmares of what could have been had one fated teenage boy not seized opportunity when it arose.

Rookwood squats to the cold stone floor of his cell and rests his face in his hands. Thunder booms outside his rain-blasted, iron barred window. The storm rages out there, forever. Whether it's magical or merely a meteorological hell he's trapped in, he doesn't care. Kill me. Kill me, Aurors. They may have purged this place of Dementors decades ago when he was imprisoned here for the final time, but that it made no less his earthly Tartarus. The moans of despondent compatriots from the vertical cells running fifty stories above and below him echo about Azkaban's central shaft, the cries of dead men trapped in rotting sacs of flesh on this horrible mortal coil. Just like him. Just like all his dreams for a better life.

Twenty-odd years here have carved an imprint of the hellscape outside of his cell into his vision, even when he clamps his eyes closed and presses his palms hard enough into his face to evoke pain. Triangular walls, cells ringing an interior empty axis that rises from the ground far below all the way to an unseen hole in the top of the prison. He's never seen the hole, never seen the thunderclouds through it, but the rain pouring down every day and every night tells him he's correct. It reeks of decay in here, despite the open air. His body, maybe, the sores that cover his bottom and the backs of his legs from the days on end he's spent lying motionless before the ceaseless howling of the gods outside. He can stand, he can walk from wall to wall in this black stone sepulcher. He only wishes it would swallow him up already.

A hand slaps the bars of his cell and he jerks away as if struck. "Still kicking, you ape?" a burly, mustaches man wearing a black and silver cloak laughs. Rookwood hates this Auror. He knows they shift off now and then and bring in new blood to guard the prisoners, but Phillip Hamell feels as if he's always here, and always looking to make Rookwood's life sentence feel like ten lives. "Woulda given up by now if I were you. Voldemort isn't coming back."

Rookwood grits his teeth, curls his lip, and growls, "Hell with you."

"Whassat?" Hamell laughs, leaning in towards the bars. Magical bars, a cage of sorcery. If Rookwood had has wand, he'd end this miserable toady of Harry Potter in an instant. "You mad I said his name? Vol-de-mort. There ya go. Not You-know-who anymore. You wanna hit me for that? C'mon. Hit me. Come out here and hit me, you dung pie. All these other prisoners have gone years and years without a little release of their own. Maybe I should let them in there with you, let them have a go? How'd you like me then, Death Eater? More like cock eater, way it'd be then."

Rookwood fights back bile. This miserable Auror wants him to slam his hands against the bars, get angry. Make his day. He won't. He'll fight, even as misery curls and writhes in his stomach. Powerless. A caged, lifeless, dying animal, August Rookwood on display in this stone-cased zoo. Watch him eat, despair, and die day by day.

Hamell grabs the bars with one hand and leers at him. "Something the matter? You look – "

The Auror doesn't finish. He freezes before Rookwood's cell, as if time has stopped for all of him but his eyes. His darting eyes, firing this way and that, struggling, twitching, desperate before the uncertainty and seeing all but the man in the white cloak approaching from behind. Rookwood sees the cloaked man's arm jerk back, sees the flash of metal, and sees the spurt of blood as a knife blade explodes from Hamell's throat.

Rookwood scrambles back against the outer wall of his cell. The white-cloaked man grabs Hamell's hair, yanks the Auror's head back, twists his knife, and shoves the dying body to the ground. He turns his head, but all Rookwood can see is shadow beneath his hood. "Augustus Rookwood?" he asks, his voice gravelly, old. His accent is thin, but noticeable. Eastern or Central European. German, Austrian, Czech, maybe.

All Rookwood can do is nod. Twenty-plus years a prisoner has taken all the courage of the fight from him. He is stupefied, petrified without a basilisk, stunned when the cloaked man pulls out a wand and presses it to the lock of his cell door. A hiss, a puff of smoke, and the door curls inward with nary a sound.

Too good to be true. Perhaps he is hallucinating. He has heard as much from the other prisoners, from the screams and wails that will never escape his mind. "What do you want?" he says through gritted teeth.

The cloaked man is not alone. Another man, a man in drab prisoner's garb, with unwashed, long black hair and an angular face, stumbles up beside him. A familiar man. "Augustus?" he gasps, his voice ragged and so far from the confident growl of Antonin Dolohov that Rookwood once knew. "Augustus, god dammit!"

Rookwood is no longer in control of his body. He stumbles to his feet, awkward as a newborn, grasping the wall for support until he wraps his arms around his brother in an embrace so many years lacking. "Antonin. God, I thought you were dead, all of you – how many – "

"We're it. Augustus, listen to him, listen – "

The cloaked man steps forward and Dolohov breaks off the embrace. "You were Tom Riddle's master of information, is that right?" he rasps.

Rookwood holds on to Dolohov's arm for support. _Tom Riddle_. The Dark Lord. The Dark Lord. "I served Lord Voldemort. Now what do you want?"

Dolohov moves to hold him back, but the cloaked man is faster: "To hear if you can serve another. I come on behalf of a better world. Fight for it or die in here. Your choice."

"Augustus…" Dolohov cautions.

He is weak. He is unsteady, and he has no reason to trust this stranger who killed an Auror with such ease. But he feels he can fight, and anything is better than spending another day in this hell. Phillip Hamell's death is a welcome bonus, the bastard. Rookwood nods, and the cloaked man passes by him without another word. The stranger, rescuer even, pulls out a second wand from the folds of his robes. Rookwood takes a step forward, as if to accept the gift, but the man presses the second wand to the wall and traces a man-sized rectangle around the barred window that has been Rookwood's sole vision of the world since the Dark Lord's fall.

The wall hisses, fizzes, and with a final _whoomph_ falls away from the wall. A blast of North Sea wind, a hail of rain. Rookwood takes a step forward, his mouth agape, and spreads his arms wide. Despite his miniscule window, he has never felt the rain come through his cell all these years. He has pressed his face to the bars, screamed out to the abyss, and watched as the rain passed him by. Now, finally, he feels the drops splatter against his skin.

He feels the wet drip down his cheeks. After so long without knowing the world, after so long in this menagerie of suffering, he cannot help but cry. Dolohov falls to his knees beside him. They are one in the same, men reborn beneath the endless storm, pulled from the darkness to face a world where anything again is possible. What once was so is again before them.

 _Savior_. _Champion_. This stranger cloaked in white.

The cloaked man leans outside the hole he's made and glances up the outer wall of Azkaban. It's a hundred stories of vertical sheer, smooth obsidian slick from rain. He is unperturbed: The man aims his wands at the sky and twitches each, then the right wand a second time. Ropes burst from the tips, snaking higher and higher until Rookwood cannot see them amongst the rain clouding his vision. Up there, something awaits. Hope beckons.

The three ropes hang steady from the wall, adhered to a point high above that only the cloaked man knows. He pockets his wands and nods towards the dangling cords blowing in the wind: "Grab hold."

Rookwood does not need to be told twice. If he need climb, so be it. He will move heaven and earth to escape hell. He grabs hold of one rope with both hands, shutting his eyes and preparing for a torturous climb to the top of Azkaban. Yet as soon as he takes hold the rope jerks him higher, pulling him away from the hole in the only home he has known for more than two decades, higher and higher towards the clouds that spit lightning and boom with thunder, that sound of freedom. The cloaked man is above him, riding his own ascending rope, Dolohov below. Rookwood is laughing, laughing, mania born from a man reborn. For the third time in his life he feels alive.

Ten feet short of the lip of Azkaban's roof, the rope jerks to a stop. The cloaked man his one wand out, his left hand clinging to his rope as he glances down and says, "Aurors on the roof. You two stay here."

"I can still fight," Dolohov growls beside Rookwood, hands clinging to the rope as he struggles to find a foothold. "I'll fight beside you. Toss me a wand."

The cloaked man shakes his head. A moment later he is gone, clambered over the lip and onto the roof. Rookwood holds up a palm to halt Dolohov. The man is tempestuous, this he knows. Instead Rookwood tightens his grip and pulls himself higher, foot by torturous foot, muscles unused for decades rediscovering that they are indeed part of the human body. After what feels like another life in prison Rookwood grasps the lip of the roof and inches one eye over, just enough to see the proceedings above.

Five Aurors face the cloaked man, arranged along the two spokes of the wall that surround the triangular hole in the roof that extends down Azkaban's central shaft. Rookwood recognizes only the leader: A man who has spat at him too many times, a man he recognizes all the way back to storming Hogwarts at the Dark Lord's side so many years ago. A man grown, once a boy. Seamus is his name. Seamus Finnegan.

"Dark wizard," Seamus growls, his wand in hand as he takes a step towards the cloaked man. "You a Death Eater? Who are you?"

The cloaked man dual-wields wands and steps his right leg forward in a ready poise, but makes no move to recognize his opponents. "A man with regrets. Nothing more."

"Didn't answer my question. You've pulled two known Death Eaters from their cells. You one of them? Voldemort's long dead. You can't win back that."

"I don't serve Tom Riddle," the cloaked man spits. "I don't serve the house of Slytherin. Go back to your home, Auror. Go back and forget all this."

A short, stout witch beside Finnegan snorts. " _You_ can go back below and join those two Death Eaters in a cell, if you want. Or you can die here."

"There're five of us," Finnegan adds. "There's one of you. You can't escape here alive, especially not with the two you broke out. Give up, wizard. Imprisonment's better than death."

The cloaked man laughs. For the first time, Rookwood imagines him as human. "I spent so long Imprisoned," he says, "a lot longer than any of you young heroes have been alive. All I want is to die. I don't have anything else. I wish it was that simple."

Finnegan steps forward. "Then die, dark wizard."

"No. Not yet."

Thunder roars and action flares. The cloaked man spins on one foot and flips over the other as Finnegan's stunner rockets through where he was. The stout witch fires a stunner of her own and the cloaked man pirouettes, twirls, and flashes his wands. Lighting blasts. The Aurors dive and somersault of the way as pillars of light explode from the heavens and smash into the prison roof, spikes of lightning jetting this way and that as the cloaked man finds his footing and twitches his wands. _Spat, spat, spat._ Jets of blue light flash from the wand tips, The stout witch rolls away from her partner and throws up a shield, but her fellow Auror isn't so lucky. The cloaked wizard knocks aside a disarming spell and fires a white blast at the first wizard in his path. It's a simple spell, a first-year Hogwarts spell at that, a Severing Charm – and in an instant the wizard's right arm is severed from his shoulder. He screams, clutching at his bloody stump, and the cloaked man twirls and kicks him in the chest.

Rookwood wishes he could hear the Auror screaming all the way down past the walls to the rocks below.

The cloaked man doesn't react. He somersaults away from a barrage of stunners and fires an orange jet at the hole in the prison roof. The spell coalesces into a red orb, a globe of magical light that at once spits a rapid-fire host curses at the remaining four Aurors. Finnegan and the rest dance away, shield charms disintegrating before the machine gun fire of the cloaked man's curse, but one wizard takes a wrong step and falls backward into Azkaban's central column. He grabs hold of the side just as he falls, and a witch takes his wrist in her arm and pulls him back up enough to give him a firm handhold. The cloaked man sees opportunity: He reflects a disarming spell back at Finnegan before twisting his other wand in a circle and directing a shaft of lightning from the sky onto the crown of the witch's head. She shakes, trembles, and falls to the ground, the wizard she was helping up gasping and pulling away right before the lightning strikes. He's too late: The cloaked man aims a follow-up jet of white light at his head, erupting his cranium like a melon and sending him off the roof to Azkaban's depths.

Finnegan fires a spell at the cloaked man's orb and knocks it out, but Rookwood's rescuer has only two Aurors left to face. The lightning-struck witch's wand rolls along the rooftop as the cloaked man squares off with his remaining foes, two against one.

Rookwood decides to act.

"Augustus, no!" Dolohov shouts, but the man will not be denied. He has failed the Dark Lord, he has failed himself, but he will not fail his future. His dreams. His one last grasp at life. The rain has awoken Augustus Rookwood.

Rookwood rolls and grabs the fallen Auror's wand. He rolls onto his stomach, aims at the stout witch beside Finnegan, and shouts the words he knows so well: " _Avada Kedavra!"_

The Killing Curse requires meaning behind it, and Rookwood means to kill. But the wand is not his, and it sputters with merely a spark of green light to answer his attempted curse. The witch levels her wand and fires a curse at him, but the cloaked man is faster. He intercepts it with a shield charm from his left wand, his right firing back the red jet of a curse of his own, and in an instant the three combatants are locked in battle. Dolohov clambers over the side and crouches down with Rookwood, the two former Death Eaters reduced to mere observers as the two Aurors fight for their lives before the cloaked man's onslaught.

He is a devil, a demon from a more violent world. He is no Lord Voldemort in terms of magical skill, Rookwood thinks, but he is a combat magician unrivaled. He twirls, pirouettes, dodges and counters and parries and blurs against the world as the two Aurors struggle to keep up. The cloaked man never stops, never halts to catch his breath. He is combat magic in motion, sorcery made form, spells launched on the wind. At last he summons a horde of knives and sends them whizzing one at a time at Finnegan, distracting him long enough for the cloaked man to round on the stout witch and turn the full force of his fury on her. He flashes one wand and pulls a horde of rubble out of thin air, throwing the mass at her as she blasts it away just in time. Just as quickly he follows up with a stunning spell of his own, not waiting to see it reflected off her shield before he curls a ball of fire around his left wand and spews fireballs all about her. She stumbles, just holding off the assault and tripping as the cloaked man hits her with a body-bind curse. The witch freezes, her eyes pleading as the cloaked man angles his right wand and disintegrates her.

Finnegan falls back. He retreats beneath the cloaked man's assault, his wand just keeping up shield charms enough to absorb the onslaught. Rookwood can taste freedom when he spots a blur speeding in from the stormy skies.

In an instant his gut tenses up. It's a broom, a rider. Backup. As the broom closes, he sees a trim, pretty witch with short-cropped blonde hair trailing in the wind closing in. He grabs the wand that failed him, clutching it with all the conviction of a man who has tasted freedom and refuses to return to bondage. He will not let this witch kill his savior. He will not return to hell.

She zips alongside the roof without the cloaked man noticing, a bulky, hide-wrapped package beneath her brook swaying in the wind. The witch vaults off her broom and onto the roof, and to Rookwood's surprise, levels her wand at Finnegan and fires a curse. The Auror catches it in a shield charm just in time, his eyes wide, his teeth gritted and his jaw clenched. He holds the cloaked man and his new ally back for a moment, another, until finally a hex slips past his defenses and hits him in the shoulder. Finnegan stumbles, black growth clawing all over his arm.

The cloaked man spins his wands and launches a jet of blue light.

The blast catches Finnegan in the chest and launches him into the air. To his credit he doesn't scream: Rookwood watches him fly off the side of the prison roof, rocketing off towards the roiling sea, towards death, the only greeter waiting below. A battle well fought, Auror.

The new arrival scowls and unwraps the bundle dangling beneath her broom. It's a bulky package, and when she opens it three more brooms spill out: Older models, to be sure, but stout and sturdy enough to carry a man through the storm.

The witch frowns and plants her hands on her hips. "You said you'd be finished by the time I showed up," she says to the cloaked man. A thicker accent, Rookwood thinks. French. Breton. "You said – "

"Not now, Alerie," the man says. For a moment Rookwood thinks he sees a face beneath a hood, something human. Then it disappears, and he is simply the white-cloaked rescuer once more. "Get them out. Now."

The witch, Alerie, scowls and nudges the free brooms at Rookwood and Dolohov. She needn't say a word: Rookwood snatches a broom up and kicks off into the air, years and years of rotting in a cell be damned. Suddenly the pain in his muscles is gone, the ache and wear of rotting in a cell disappeared. He feels as free as he was fighting for Voldemort back in the eighties so long ago, a young man, a reborn man. Dolohov is beside him, laughing, his hand wrapped around his broom handle. Alerie motions them forward, and as Rookwood looks back and sees the cloaked man standing on the Azkaban roof, shrinking into the distance, he cannot help but wonder what he has gotten himself into.

Whatever it is, it is worth it. He is free, a man to fight and believe again. No longer a beast to be beaten, to be cursed at by those Ministry devils, those Auror horrors, but a man. A man.


	6. Weathered Yet Walking

_Thank you for the lovely review, Scorpiusisthebest! And apologies for the very late update._

* * *

She frets over dreams, she thinks of boys, she worries about Quidditch. Ancient Runes class is the last thing on Lily's mind.

Not as if Professor Graff notices. The red-cheeked, blonde-mustached, twig-thin man faces the blackboard at the front of the class, his back turned as a pair of Hufflepuff girls pass notes, stifle giggles, and shoot looks Devon's way. "Your first essays for the term were adequate," he harrumphs. One of the Hufflepuff girls swats the other in the eye, and still the resulting shriek does not rouse Graff from his rambling. "Adequate, mmm, but room for improvement from all of you. Your O.W.L. exams will be difficult if we do not improve our pace of learning! Here – I've written on the board a cipher, found some time ago in Northern Scotland. Take a few minutes, find what patterns you can with your partner. We'll reconvene then."

Devon rolls his eyes. "Wonder what fun things Nat and Brandon'll be doing in Divination without us?"

"Brandon's probably sleeping," Lily mumbles, doodling a rune dripping hearts all over her note-taking parchment. "Staring at tea leaves would make me want to sleep, too. Or watch paint peel off the wall. Or watch grass -" she pauses. Visions of the forest, of blood, of specters. The aftertaste of bitter dreams. "Do you…" she starts and stops. Three years' friendship will not keep at bay her anxieties that Devon will think she's an idiot for asking dumb questions. "You think there's anything to all that stuff?"

"To Divination?" Devon says. He scowls at his copy of _The Conjunction of the Scripts_ and pushes the textbook away. "Nah. Prophecies and all that? Too much fantasy. Alright, maybe one out of a thousand wizards or witches sees something once in a blue moon…I don't know, maybe time plays tricks now and then. Besides that, no. C'mon, tea leaves and crystal balls?"

"What about, like, dreams?"

He frowns. "Something up?"

"No, I'm just – "

Professor Graff plants his hands on his waist and waggles a finger at Lily. "Ah! Have an answer, do you? Alright, tell me what you've got. Any clues as to what this script says?"

Lily wilts and sinks into her seat. Devon pretends _The Conjunction of the Scripts_ is the second coming of the Bible. "It's…er, the first runes look – "

"You know it or not, Ms. Potter?"

Two desks to the left, Scarlett Massey's hand shoots up. She starts before Graff finishes calling her name: "The first and second runes match ancient Pictish script from around the time of Hogwarts's formation. When combined together, they look like the early Scottish and Irish rune for snake. Given that the third rune is the early Scottish rune for castle and the sixth resembles the rune for father, _I'd_ say it has something to do with Salazar Slytherin."

"A-ha, a winner!" Graff chortles. "That's right. At least, as far as most Runic scholars are able to understand. This was found on a stone overlooking a field of barrows that for at least three of which are known to have been the final resting places of direct descendants of Slytherin. The man was certainly fruitful, that's for certain: Genealogists have pinpointed that he had at least twelve children, seven of whom – "

A ball of parchment smacks Lily in the temple. She winces and reacts in time to see Scarlett blowing a kiss at her. Ellie Corner mocks laughter beside her Gryffindor friend. Heat blooming across her face, Lily opens up the parchment ball to reveal a hasty quill drawing of a badger squatting over a pile of excrement with "Lily" written inside it. Next to the badger, a series of runes scramble and unscramble from a series indecipherable symbols to reading "IDIOT."

Lily huffs and crumples up the parchment. Ignore them, Devon would say. So would Al, and her parents, and Aunt Hermione. They love the attention. Yet she can't shake the thought that they like her resignation even more.

Hex them right in the middle of class, Natalie would say. Who cares of fuddy-duddy Graff sees? Lily smiles and wonders if that's the better option.

But Lily is not as strong as her friend. She is capable of wounds, capable of hurt, weak to vulnerabilities and flaws she can't see in others, battered and scarred by off-hand remarks and insults and the arrows and bullets of school. The nicks and chinks dig beneath her skin and haunt her into the hours past midnight, keep her scribbling a stream of consciousness into her dog-eared journal that her father gave her on her twelfth birthday until the Ravenclaw common room is empty but for the house's steadfast night owls. Now and then she sets down her quill and flips back to pages long since covered in ink, wondering who wrote all those optimistic entries. _I can't believe second year is almost over. I know I'll get an O on my Potions exam, but I'm worried that I missed the last two questions in Transfiguration…I wish James would come by more. I can't believe he only has one more year at Hogwarts. I can't wait until I get into sixth year, with all the fun he's always having…I finally got the courage to talk to Natalie in our house, just the two of us. She's so much cooler than me, always hanging around with Ellie and Marie and that pretty Gryffindor girl Scarlett and everyone else. I wonder if we'll all be friends come this time next year._

Now the hopeful girl that called herself Lily Potter seems another person entirely, one lost to a past where the pages weren't full of scribbled entries describing Scarlett's giggling and hushed glances towards Slytherin's Isaac Zabini, backstabbing insults whispered outside the girls' toilets, crying students rushing away from the Great Hall, or exams coming back with mere A grades, if not worse, after nights where Lily's mind ran off to anywhere but studying. Is this what happens to all of them when the magic of Hogwarts becomes just another mundanity? Was all magic doomed to die before the slow rot of common anxieties and self-inflicted wounds?

Lily wishes she could turn back time. She wishes she could still imagine herself making friends with all of her classmates, dreaming of the future and the present rather than of nightmares and sensationalist headlines in the _Daily Prophet_. She wishes she still saw Natalie as that golden girl she aspired to be, rather than the friend now gripping the newspaper with clenched fists and a face full of disgust before the common room fire. Bruises, anger, sarcastic quips. Fourth-year Natalie Avery is a girl wholly apart from who Lily saw just a few years back. She's certainly no longer friends with Scarlett and Ellie.

This growing up business left much to be desired.

Natalie tosses aside the paper and buries her face in her hands. "This is bullshit," she mutters, only half-aware of Lily in the armchair a few feet away. "Go ahead, do it, assholes. Whatever."

"What's wrong?" Lily murmurs, looking up from her journal.

Natalie spits at the fire and tosses the newspaper at Lily before storming off towards the staircase leading up to the dormitories. Before the stairs, Rowena Ravenclaw's granite statue flickers with shadow and firelight. Lily watches her friend go, watches the statue glow beneath the winking stars of the common room's constellation-spangled ceiling. Did Rowena imagine the things her house could become? Creativity, intellect, wit…nowhere in there lies anxiety, competition, self-criticism, and the pitfalls of schoolgirls so small before the world and before one another.

Lily unfurls the crumpled _Prophet_. A square-jawed man scowls at her from the page as the headline reads, _New Minister for Magic, New Era!_

 _LONDON – Newly-elected Minister for Magic Rhys Mallory announced a sweeping vision for security and public safety on Monday in the wake of the terrorism wave that has swept Europe since July. Proclaiming "An end to chaos and fear," the Minister outlined a plan to bolster defenses at Azkaban Prison following last week's break-out of the last two confirmed surviving Death Eaters, Augustus Rookwood and Antonin Dolohov. Mallory additionally laid forth a plan to institute safeguards at Hogwarts, the stationing of Auror patrols across major British magical settlements such as Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, and Godric's Hollow, and the restriction of border crossing from the continent._

 _In perhaps his boldest undertaking for the new administration, Mallory proclaimed the institution of a task force to investigate, and if necessary, prosecute, members of notable Wizarding families with ties to former or suspected Death Eaters or associates in light of the Azkaban break-out…_

Safeguards at Hogwarts. Lily bristles: She knows of her father's stories about his fifth year, about the Ministry's yearning for control over the school. It can't happen now, though – not with Voldemort dead, with her father as the head of the Aurors, with Aunt Hermione as the head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation. If not that, then what? Hunting Death Eaters, protecting magical settlements…Lily sees nothing out of the ordinary with the new Minister's plans, whoever the man is at heart. She still has the letter her mother sent her the day after the Azkaban attack, about six Aurors killed, about Seamus Finnegan, her parents' fellow student at Hogwarts during the dark days of Voldemort's return. Good riddance to any Death Eaters still lingering about.

What about that riled Natalie up enough to make her storm off to bed?

She doesn't find out at breakfast. The next morning Natalie stews about her oatmeal, ignoring conversation and fixing her eyes at the lines in the wooden Ravenclaw table. Lily is grateful to tromp off to Charms and break the awkwardness, and even more grateful when her cousin Hugo stops her in the hall and gives her an excuse to let Natalie go on ahead.

"Al's looking for you," Hugo says, his hair more chaotic than usual, the usual vacuity Lily sees in his eyes every Charms class already settling in. "Said he wanted to go see Hagrid with you."

"That was that urgent you had to nab me before class?" Lily says. "Fine, whatever. I'm happy to see Hagrid. And Al."

Hugo shuffles from foot to foot. "Yeah, it's…um…look, I know you're busy, class and Quidditch tryouts this weekend, and all that."

"Hugo, can you please get to the point before we get detention for being late and die of old age?"

He sighs. "Do you know a third-year Gryffindor girl named Piper Dunn?"

"No, should – " Lily lets her words drop off as she realizes what her cousin's saying. "Hugo, do you have a crush on some girl?"

"What? No!"

Lily giggles. "Seriously, I'm not going to say anything. I hope you didn't tell Rose."

"No, it's – listen, can we just talk? Like, just us? Sorry, I just don't know how to talk about this with anyone else, and you're…well, you're you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Damnit cuz, please?"

She holds back a laugh. "Alright, fine. I'll help you with your girlfriend, or whoever this Piper is. And I'll go find Al after classes are done. Meet me on Friday."

The sun sinks low over the Scottish hills when Lily finds Al near the Herbology greenhouses. Lines cross his furrowed brow, whether caused by stress of school and prefect duties or by some other wear she cannot say. He's taller than James but lanky, and even his tailored robes hang off his shoulders and dangle past his knees. He scarcely reacts when she approaches.

"Ready to go?" he asks, and leads her down the grounds towards Hagrid's hovel without a word.

The Forbidden Forest is quiet. A handful of birds flutter from the treetops as Lily and Al walk along the edge of the woods, but no squirrels, no rabbits, no deer peer out from the darkness between the trees. Even the leaves, just beginning to transition from summer green to the bright blooming fire of Autumn, seem limp and more barren than normal to Lily. It's as if a fungus has taken root deep beyond where Hogwarts treads and has spread its tendrils throughout the rich earth, sapping the forest's vitality like a strangler vine.

Hagrid's hut is a warm sight amidst the growing cold. A fire within the stone hearth flickers from behind glazed windows. Pumpkins ripen and plump in the neighboring patch, while the sooterkins from Care of Magical Creatures class gurgle and run about their fenced-in pen. Lily's sooterkin lies on its side on the far side of the pen, ignoring the other beasts, ignoring the cabbage and melon rinds she tried to feed it just yesterday. Poor thing, she thinks. Despite Hagrid's encouragement, she doesn't think the little guy has much time left. She wants to blame whoever sold Hagrid the critters just before the term started, but she can't deny the guilt that wells up in her every class: _You can't even keep this dumb rodent thing alive. What good are you?_

Shep, Hagrid's black Irish wolfhound that size of a horse, snoozes by the door when Lily steps over the threshold. Pastries resembling small boulders pile upon a plate on Hagrid's old oaken dining table. The warm air smells of tea and baking, of earth and animals. For a Gryffindor, Hagrid's hut reminds Lily of Hufflepuffs more than anything. A friendly place, a non-discriminating home apart from the castle.

Hagrid grins when he sees them. "There y'ar. Back when yer father was yer size I'd get on his case fer walkin' the grounds a'this hour, but…ah, I'm gettin' old too complain about tha'. Grab a seat. Tea's brewin'."

The tea tastes like pine needles and the scones make Lily secretly wish she had Muggle dentists for parents like Aunt Hermione, but it's the thought that counts. For one night she's happy not to eat in the Great Hall, not when her spirit wants to curl up inside her and keep out the world for a day. Gossip and schoolgirl spite, dreams and newspaper headlines, it's too much of a storm for her to keep at bay. The winds stop at Hagrid's house.

"Forest's quiet," Lily murmurs, nursing her tea. "It's like all the animals left."

Hagrid frowns. "Yea. Haven' seen the centaurs much lately. Usually they'd come 'round now and then."

"I thought they didn't like people."

"They ain't totally hostile. Not great talkers, sure. But I could get along. Not like when You-Know – ah, a'right, _Voldemort_ was comin' back. They didn' want nothin' to do with us then."

Lily reminiscences on the _Daily Prophet_. "Hagrid, you were…well, back when…"

"Yea, I'm old. Ye two'll be old someday."

"I didn't mean it like that. It's just this whole Death Eaters coming out of Azkaban thing, and that new Minister saying he's going to…do all this stuff…"

Hagrid's smile dies. Shadow grows in the age lines that cross his face. "Sounds like the same thing Barty Crouch did durin' the firs' war. Anythin' and everythin' to catch anyone he thought was a dark wizard, or even related to a dark wizard. Unforgivable Curses. Sham trials. Jus' a mess. An' there's plenty o' families still around today who had either family members who went to the Death Eaters, or got involved in all tha'. Malfoys, look a'them. Selwyns. Averys."

"Excuse me, what?" Lily says, choking down tea. "Like, Natalie in my class's family?"

"Ye. Woulda thought yer dad woulda told ya that, since ye and her seem like good friends. Her dad's big in Gringotts, but there was an Avery runnin' around with Riddle in Slytherin back when I was a student. Became one of th' first Death Eaters. His son also wen' on to be a Death Eater. Dunno how close the whole family was, but tha's the connection."

Lily doesn't know what to say. It explains Natalie's anger at the _Prophet_ , but Lily can't believe Hagrid's words. Natalie's a Ravenclaw, smart, cool, talkative and fearless. Lily wishes she could be half of that. That's not what she imagines Death Eaters to have been like. That's not the Slytherins she knows now, not what she reads from history books and hears from her parents about life a generation ago.

She wants to ask her friend, ask her everything, but she knows she can't. It's one mystery she'll have to investigate herself.

Al has been quiet the whole conversation. Finally, he speaks up after he drains his tea: "Hagrid, when our dad was a student…given that he was connected to Voldemort in all those ways, did he ever mention anything about Occlumency?"

Lily frowns. Why on earth does Al care about Occlumency, except for after-hours studying?

Hagrid looks just as perplexed. "Well, dunno 'bout that. I know he and Snape studied that fer a bit, didn' do much good accordin' to what Hermione's told me. Ye tryin' to pick up extra studies?"

He shrugs. "Just curious."

Al doesn't offer anything more until after Lily leaves with him to head back to the castle. He pauses by the shore of the Black Lake, where the giant squid lounges on the surface in the last light of day. It's a scene from a photograph, Lily thinks: The orange evening glow turns the castle grounds into a field of sunflowers, the rippling water a sheet of crystals, Hogwarts itself a candy castle beneath the persimmon sky. The silence is welcome now, the quiet of the moment, and Lily wants nothing more than to freeze this photo forever.

Twisting his hands about one another, Al says, "You get the feeling that things aren't exactly right around here?"

"Between all sorts of bad things happening in the paper, the forest looking half-dead, and my almost-failing grades in Charms, I thought it was normal," Lily says, her joke falling flat. She shuffles from one foot to another. "No, um…Al, why'd you want to know about Occlumency?"

He frets, shoots her a glance, and stares off at the sunlit lake. For a minute she thinks he won't answer, until he sighs and says, "I've just been having some strange dreams as of late."

Lily's gut curls in on itself. "What kind of dreams?"

"It's just dreams," he snorts. "Nothing. Just personal."

"Al, please, tell me," she pleads, grabbing his arm. "I want to know. I'm not going to judge you. I'm not going to tell anyone."

Her brother pulls back from her eagerness. "Since when're you so interested in dreams? You don't even take Divination."

"It's not about Divination," she says, swallowing down bile. "It's – look, ever since last week, when I go to sleep, I…ugh, it sounds stupid, but it's a dream. I see this ghost that cuts me and when I'm bleeding, there's this vision of Dad I have, like the ghost is trying to see him through me. I know, it's stupid – "

Al looks at her with his brow furrowed. "Every night?"

"Yeah."

"Lily, it's…has anyone else you've talked to said anything about bad dreams?"

"No," she says. Al grits his teeth and rubs his forehead. At once Lily knows: He's having the same dream. Is Rose, Hugo? Is it just their family? "Al, what is going on? Between all this stuff happening in the paper, this…shouldn't we tell somebody?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know. Listen, sis. Let's wait until we have a better idea of what's going on. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's something serious, we can't know. But until we have more clues, more details, all we'll do by spreading the word is freak people out. Just talk to me if anything happens, alright? We'll figure this out. Together."

Lily frowns, hesitates, and finally nods. "I'm kind of freaked out myself."

"I know. Me too. Me too."

He takes her hand, and Lily looks out over the lake as the sun dips behind the highland hills. She wants to go back in time, back before she visited the Ministry with her father, back before Ministers for Magic were being killed and Death Eaters weren't breaking out of Azkaban.

She can't, and she knows whatever waits beyond those hills and that sunset, beyond this day and tomorrow and the day after, she can only keep going, a little stronger, a little more battered but still walking.


End file.
